For Weaver and the rest of the team, Huntsman's intelligence and foreign policy experience, combined with his strong record of fiscal conservatism and social semi-moderation (he supports civil unions for gay couples and believes climate change is an urgent issue), made him the ideal candidate to shake up a Republican field that Weaver calls "the weakest since 1940."

"There's a simple reason our party is nowhere near being a national governing party," Weaver told Esquire. "No one wants to be around a bunch of cranks."

Weaver doesn't specify exactly which cranks he's talking about, but on its face the quote is a harsher criticism of the Republican Party, by far, than we've heard from any other presidential campaign.

And speaking of other campaigns, Weaver doesn't hold back on them either:

Weaver sees Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the presumed front-runner, as a man afraid to take a stand — or, more accurately, as a man unafraid of taking every stand. "What version are we on now?" Weaver said. "Mitt 5.0? 6.0?"

And in former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, another leading candidate, Weaver sees what he considers the worst tendencies of his party — pandering to the G.O.P.'s hard-right margins at the risk of falling out of serious presidential contention.

"Tim's a nice guy," Weaver said, "and there's nothing worse than seeing a nice guy pretend that he's angry. Is that really what we want to be? Is that how we're going to define ourselves? When's the last time an angry man ever solved a problem without using a gun?"